Chapter 6

Rukawa awoke at 5:30 in the morning. He lay in bed without opening his eyes for a few minutes, listening to the birds chirping outside. For the first time since he had arrived at Kainan, he had got a good night's sleep, undisturbed by paranormal visitations. Now all that was left for him to achieve the perfect start to his day was to go on a short jog around Kainan's grounds and practice basketball for an hour. Everything was back to normal again.

He got out of bed and gazed at the rising sun behind Kainan's main school building. There was nothing threatening about the building whatever in the golden light of the morning sun. In fact, Rukawa thought it looked awfully peaceful. As far as the campus went, Kainan's sprawling lawns were several cuts above Shohoku's cramped urban campus, which could hardly fit a patch of grass between the school building and all the sporting facilities. At Kainan, on the other hand, you could wander around till you got lost and still not have left campus.

Rukawa was in the process of changing into his jogging clothes when he heard an ear-splitting scream from outside. It was a girl.

"Ayako-senpai."

Rukawa dashed out into the corridor. Which one was Ayako's room?

Several heads poked out of their rooms, Miyagi's being the first among them. The Shohoku point guard leapt to the opposite side of the corridor and began pounding his fists on the door.

"Aya-chan! Are you okay?"

No response.

Maki and the rest had come out of their rooms by this point. He tried the door handle.

"It's no good," he said. "It's locked."

"We'll have to force it," said Uozumi. "Step out of the way, Miyagi."

Uozumi rushed the door like an army tank. The whole floor shook under the force of the impact, but the door continued to hold. Uozumi rushed the door a second time, and it snapped clean off its hinges.

Miyagi leapt into the room over the felled door.

"Aya-chan!"

The room looked as if a typhoon had swept through it. Ayako's duffel bag had been disemboweled, and its contents lay scattered across the floor. Books lay open on their spines. Lampshades were askew. The bed had been divested of linens. There was no sign of Ayako amid the flotsam and jetsam.

"Aya-chan!" Miyagi looked under the bed and under the desk. "Where are you?"

Akagi stepped blushingly over the more private of Ayako's garments that lay on the floor, and tried sticking his hand out of the embrasure. His arm got caught just below the elbow.

"There's no way she could have got out through the window," he grunted.

"There's no other way in or out of the room," said Maki. "She would've had to have gone out the door."

"But the door was locked," said Sendoh.

"She could have locked it behind her."

"Not possible," said Uozumi, indicating the door he had knocked down. The chain had been fastened, and half of it was still attached to the doorframe.

"I'd say she was abducted," said Kogure.

"Oh, really now?" Mitsui snapped. "You're telling me ghosts have now taken to bodily abducting people straight out of their beds?"

"No." Kogure looked affronted at the suggestion that he should entertain such a ludicrous idea. "It was aliens, obviously."

Miyagi bent down and picked Ayako's red baseball cap off the floor. Tears welled up in his eyes as he held it in his hands, wondering what terrible fate could have befallen Ayako.

"Aya-chan," he wept. "Please come back, Aya-chan."

Sakuragi patted his shoulder.

"Don't worry, Ryo-chin," he said. "The Tensai will put his genius detective skills to the task. We'll find her in no time."

"Idiot," Rukawa scoffed.

"Damn you, Rukawa!"

"In that case, we'll definitely never find her." Mitsui smirked.

"Mitchy!"

"Hey, guys," said Sendoh, gazing up at the air conditioning vent above the dresser. "Could she have gone in there somehow? It certainly looks large enough to admit a person."

Maki inspected the grille over the air vent. It had been unscrewed.

"Certainly looks like it," he said.

"Where do the air ducts lead?" asked Uozumi.

"No idea," said Maki.

"Aya-chan!" Miyagi scrambled up the dresser and climbed into the vent.

"Miyagi, wait!" said Maki, but it was too late. "That idiot! It could be dangerous in there. What if he gets lost?"

"He won't rest till he finds Ayako," said Akagi.

"Jin," said Maki. "Turn off the air conditioning."

Jin nodded and took off, with Kiyota close behind.

Nobody wanted to consider the possibility that Ayako had met with a grisly demise between the blades of a fan.

Suddenly there was a loud thud out in the corridor.

Maki and the others rushed out to see Miyagi crouched on the floor, massaging his bottom.

"Damn it," said Miyagi. "One of the grilles in the ceiling was missing. I didn't see it until it was too late."

"Ayako couldn't have got across," said Sendoh, looking up at the ceiling. The vent was much too wide to cross from within the narrow air duct. "If she was indeed in there, then she had to have come out through here."

"She could be anywhere by now." Maki kicked the wall in his frustration.

"How the hell did she manage to climb in through the vent, come out over here, and leave the building—all without any of us seeing her?" said Mitsui. "It couldn't have taken more than a couple of minutes for all of us to come out of our rooms."

"I got out the moment I heard the scream," said Rukawa.

"Exactly," said Mitsui. "So why didn't anyone so much as catch a glimpse of Ayako out of the corner of their eye?"

"We must have been too focused on the door," said Akagi, who knew a thing or two about inattentional blindness.

"No one's addressing the biggest question here," said Kogure. His mania from earlier seemed to have passed for now, and he appeared to be back to his cool, collected, bespectacled old self. "What made Ayako scream in the first place?"

"I wish people'd just stop fucking disappearing." Maki punched the wall. He regretted it instantly, because he had punched straight through the drywall and pulled out a fistful of insulation.

"Aya-chan," Miyagi began wailing afresh. "Where are you?"

A flashlight intruded on their collective despair. It was Coach Takato. He had on a muddy trench coat and an old hat, and had evidently been engaged in something surreptitious.

"What are you boys doing up this early?" he said. "I thought I heard a commotion."

"Ayako's gone," Miyagi sobbed.

"What do you mean 'gone'?"

"She straight up disappeared from her room," said Mitsui. "We heard a scream, and when we went to see what happened, she was gone."

Coach Takato's eye fell on the door that Uozumi had knocked down. He began sputtering like an old motorboat.

"What… I don't… the door… you…" he stammered. "What the hell happened to that door?"

"I knocked it down," said Uozumi matter-of-factly.

Coach Takato took a moment to recover from the initial shock. He was wroth.

"Well, are you going to pay for it?"

Uozumi shrugged.

"It was an emergency," he said, not backing down. "You should be giving me credit for my quick thinking."

"Why, you—" Coach Takato checked himself before he said something unseemly. If Uozumi went back and reported his conduct to Coach Taoka, he would lose all the face he had painstakingly accrued since his high school days. "Never mind the door. Now, how could Ayako just disappear like that?"

"That's what we've been trying to figure out," said Maki, positioning himself strategically in front of the hole he had made in the wall.

"Say, Coach," said Kiyota. "What are you doing out here?"

The question caught Coach Takato off guard.

"I was… I decided to come in early and make sure everything was all right," he snapped.

Rukawa turned to Sendoh. Sendoh was smiling. He didn't buy it either.

"Let's split up and search the campus," said Coach Takato. "I'm sure we'll find her somewhere."

Miyagi was off on his own before Coach Takato had finished his sentence. The rest of the group split up, but without any real hope of finding Ayako in the vast Kainan campus, if something untoward really had befallen her.

"I doubt she's in there," said Rukawa drily as Sendoh rummaged through a bush out in the courtyard.

"Doesn't hurt to check."

Rukawa aimed a kick at Sendoh's shin and missed, and ended up sticking his foot inside the bush. His eyes widened.

"What's the matter?"

"There's something in here," said Rukawa. "Like… like…"

"Mud?"

Rukawa scowled.

"A plastic bag, I think."

Sendoh reached in and pulled out the object that Rukawa's foot had made contact with. It was a black trash bag.

Rukawa swallowed. Black trash bags seldom contained anything besides body parts.

Sendoh turned the bag upside down, and sure enough, a mummified arm fell out—so thin and shriveled that it could have been a tree branch. It had been separated from its owner just above the elbow in what appeared to be violent fashion.

Rukawa started and stepped back.

"What is that?"

"It appears to be a human arm," said Sendoh. "I'd say it's been lying here for a while."

"I can see that," said Rukawa in exasperation. "But whose is it, and how did it get here?"

"I don't know." There was a ring on the one of the fingers, badly charred and covered in embalming fluid. "That ring should be able to tell us more."

Sendoh looked around for something with which to pry the ring off the finger.

"Don't touch it," said Rukawa. "It's evidence."

"You're right," said Sendoh. "We might have to call the police."

He wasted no time in calling the police. Two uniformed policemen arrived shortly, and Sendoh and Rukawa led them to the spot where they had discovered the arm.

It was gone. There was no trace of the trash bag, either.

"What?" said Sendoh. "Where did it go?"

"Wasting our time with prank calls," one of the policemen grumbled.

"Stupid high school kids," said the other.

"No, I swear. It was right here."

"Yeah, yeah," the policemen waved as they departed. "We get a dozen calls a week reporting dead bodies that mysteriously disappear when we get to the scene."

"Damn it." Sendoh stomped his foot on the ground. "Who could have taken it, Rukawa?"

"I don't know."

Just then they heard the rustle of leaves behind them. They whirled around to behold Ayako standing among the bushes.

"Ayako! Where the hell have you been?"

Ayako didn't seem inclined to respond. She jumped out of the bush and landed in front of Rukawa. Before the Shohoku ace could process what was happening, Ayako had taken his face into both her hands and planted a big slobbery kiss on his mouth.

Rukawa's eyes widened. He had never kissed anyone before, and was blushing in spite of himself.

"Ayako-san, cut it out!" Sendoh tried tearing Ayako off Rukawa, but Ayako wouldn't let go.

Rukawa was turning purple from lack of air.

The commotion drew the attention of the rest of the group, who returned to the courtyard to see what the matter was.

Miyagi's eyes narrowed.

"Rukawa, you bastard."

He dashed up to Rukawa and roundhouse kicked him in the side. The force of the impact caused Ayako to break the kiss, and both she and Rukawa went crashing to the ground.

Mitsui and Sendoh managed to restrain Miyagi before he fell upon Rukawa with a renewed ferocity.

Rukawa rose shakily to his feet, massaging his side.

Ayako, still on the ground, moaned and clutched her head, as if she were waking up from a trance.

"Aya-chan!" Miyagi tore free of the hands restraining him and knelt before Ayako. "What happened?"

"Where am I?" Then it all came back to her. Her eyes widened. "There was a man and a woman! They were standing over my bed with a knife! They were going to kill me."

She burst into sobs.

"It's all right, Aya-chan," Miyagi embraced her tightly. "You're safe now. I won't let anything happen to you."

Maki lifted Rukawa's shirt to reveal that Miyagi's kick had left a large bruise on his torso.

"We should get that taken care of," said Maki.

"No need," said Rukawa.

"That man, Ayako-san," said Sendoh. "Was he by any chance missing an arm?"

"Not now, Sendoh." Miyagi pushed Sendoh aside. "Can't you see she's distressed?"

Sendoh stepped back obediently. He had received an answer to his question in the look of terror that had appeared on Ayako's face at the mention of the missing arm. He turned to Rukawa.

Rukawa had been tracing his lips with his fingers, wondering whether he had enjoyed the kiss. He stopped hastily when Sendoh looked his way.

"I think it's time we confronted Coach Takato," said Sendoh.

"Yes," said Rukawa with a cough.

They proceeded down to the gym, where they found Coach Takato stacking a set of foldable chairs against the wall. He had changed out of his hat and trench coat into more respectable attire.

"Sendoh-kun," he said. "And Rukawa-kun. What can I do for you? I heard you managed to find Ayako-kun. That's wonderful news. I always knew she'd turn up just fine."

Sendoh wasn't in the mood for persiflage.

"We know about your brother Toshiro."

Coach Takato froze.

"That arm we discovered in the courtyard," Sendoh went on. "It was you who took it, wasn't it?"

A tense minute passed between them; then Coach Takato sighed, knowing that it was futile to attempt to talk his way out of the situation when he had been so utterly discovered.

"It's true," he admitted.

"Well?" said Sendoh. "I think you owe us an explanation."

"You're right, Sendoh-kun," said Coach Takato. "In fact, I owe you all an explanation. Why don't we talk over tea?"

They headed down to the cafeteria, where Coach Takato had arranged a morning tea. The whole affair was decidedly more English than Japanese, adding to Kainan's image as an elite (and elitist) prep school. Only Fujima seemed at home with this arrangement.

"You were about to tell us something important, Takato-sensei," said the Shoyo ace as he sipped his tea daintily, sticking his pinky out and everything.

Coach Takato told them about his brother Toshiro Takato: how he had got tangled up with a gang, how he had been killed, and how they had found his body in the sewers.

"When they found him, there wasn't enough of him left to hold a proper funeral." Coach Takato sighed. "I almost gave up hope of ever finding him, but when I started hearing of new reports of hauntings in and around Kainan, I knew I had to find him. You see, he was killed right here on campus, and it is here that I will doubtless find the rest of him as well."

"So you believe your brother's actually come back from the dead?" said Kogure.

"I think it's a sign," said Coach Takato. "Toshiro's restless. He's impatient. He wants to move on, but he can't. Not until we lay him to rest for good."

"And what about the woman?" said Sendoh.

"What woman?"

"Hikari Mizuoka. I found her loitering in one of the classrooms. She told me her story. I've currently put her up at a motel down the street."

"Hikari?" Coach Takato blinked. "Sendoh, Hikari died twenty years ago."

"What do you mean?"

"That incident you allude to," said Coach Takato. "When the police got to the scene, they found her husband and his friends lying dead on the floor with their throats slit, and Hikari in the upstairs bedroom. She had killed herself."

Sendoh laughed.

"I'm sure you'll find that she's alive and well."

"And I'm telling you I went to her funeral myself," said Coach Takato.

Sendoh excused himself and dialed the motel he had checked Hikari into. A brief conversation with the animated receptionist revealed that no one named Hikari Mizuoka had ever checked into the motel. The reservation that Sendoh had made over the phone had been for nothing, and the receptionist had had to turn away guests even when they had a room lying empty.

Sendoh returned to the cafeteria, looking rather white. He related what he had learnt to the group. Suddenly he felt rather silly for pushing his rationalist explanations on everyone all this time.

"Bummer," said Kogure, grinning. "I guess this means this really is a haunting after all."

tbc.

A/N: Seriously. I wish people'd just stop fucking disappearing, too. If you were one of the unfortunate souls who read my original Nights at Kainan back in the day, you may remember that people had a tendency to disappear there as well, only to return anticlimactically later on. As a writer, it behooves me to be faithful to my roots.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Now is probably the best time to confess that I'm debating abandoning this fic altogether. It SUCKS. I don't know why I ever undertook to write it. Childhood fantasies under a grown-up pen turn to rot faster than a loaf of bread from the same period that you forgot about in a kitchen cabinet and happened upon eight years later when you were desirous of eating a fucking peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich. (Freddi Fish, anyone?) This fic has given me more sleepless nights than the prospect of not having a job after I graduate. Ugh.